Scott Drummonds on Virtualization

A colleague here at EMC just shared InformationWeek‘s 2013 Virtualization Management Survey. The whitepaper has “$99″ printed on its cover but the registration page suggests you can get a free copy. So, I won’t share it here. But, I do this the report is fascinating and want to share two observations to encourage you to get a copy of this report for yourself.

First, two snapshots of consolidation ratios from 2011 and 2013 expectations.

There are more, highly-consolidated servers, obviously. But there are also more sparsely-consolidated servers. I suspect this to be the result VMware’s efforts to convince customers to virtualize large mission critical applications. Big Oracle databases, for instance, benefit from the improved operational model enabled by virtualization. But they cannot be consolidated like tier-2 applications. This means more single-VM servers running big applications.

Here is one more chart with interesting, albeit confusing, information.

The interesting part is the incredible increase in desktop virtualization in the past two years. 12% more of InformationWeek’s respondents will embark on VDI journeys in 2013 when compared to 2011. Network virtualization should increase substantially, possibly reflecting the excitement around Nicira and VXLAN. But the confusing thing is the decrease is respondents that say they will virtualize servers and storage.

I cannot understand how this is possible. Except that maybe during response some people thought they could only select one option. That might have shifted results from more established virtualization techniques (server, storage) to newer ones (desktop, network).

I have only shared a fraction of the interesting stuff in this document. It is over 30 pages long and contains 28 figures. I highly recommend you check it out.